Steel, Blood & Fire (Immortal Treachery Book 1)

by Allan Batchelder

  Thinking of aberrations, the spectral image of Long’s master again revealed itself. Evidently, the End wasn’t comfortable appearing in the flesh so close to the front. “I am sending the entire host at the enemy within the hour. You will know when the time has come and assume your position in the vanguard of the assault.”

  There was nothing Long wanted to say, had he been capable.

  “Cat got your tongue?” the End taunted. “If you feel nothing else as you die, know that I have, indeed, been the end of all things – at least far as you and yours are concerned. And do not think you can escape your fate by rushing into the Queen’s arms. Your voice is not the only thing I have taken from you.”

  The sky was demonstrably lighter. Hope, then, in spite of his master’s promises. Long saluted the specter in as ambiguous a manner as he could muster. Let the fiend chew on that for a while. Had he imagined it, or had the End’s shade been scowling as it faded away?

  A series of horn blasts shattered his reverie. Downhill, the various armies comprising the End’s host began organizing themselves into a forward-attack configuration. Uphill and to Long’s left and right, the second army did likewise. The clamor of battle continued unchanged at the front.

  *****

  Vykers, the Queen’s Army

  Vykers stopped the first officer he saw and asked directions to the mess. The man recoiled in fear at the sight of the Three, but became excited as recognition dawned upon him.

  “You’re…you’re the Reaper!” he breathed. “You’re here!”

  In less time than it takes to explain it, Vykers and his chimeras were surrounded by a fast-growing mob of the Queen’s soldiers, jostling one another as they tried to get closer and verify the officer’s claim.

  “Mahnus’ balls, it’s him!”

  “The Reaper, himself!”

  “I’da never believed this day would come!”

  “The End’s in for it, now!”

  And suchlike over and over until Vykers had had enough. He drew his sword and everyone leapt back, some falling over each other in the effort.

  “You’re keepin’ my friends and me…” Vykers gestured to the Three, “from a much-needed meal. I don’t think you want to be doin’ that.” He let that settle in a moment.

  “May I show you to the mess tent?” the first man asked deferentially.

  Vykers grunted in the affirmative and followed the man away from the mob and further into the camp. As he walked along, he heard a gradually escalating commotion throughout the camp.

  Fuck’s that? He inquired of Arune.

  They’re cheering your arrival, you big idiot.

  He might’ve been insulted, but her tone was playful and carried more than a hint of pride. I ain’t done anything, yet.

  But you have. You’ve bolstered their spirits.

  Huh.

  Have you thought about what you’re going to say when you address them?

  Nope. He waited. You gonna suggest something?

  You’re the warrior, not me.

  Glad you remembered that.

  They arrived at the mess tent, which had been mostly cleared out in advance of Vykers’ arrival. Amazing how fast word travelled in a military encampment. At a long table in the back, a handful of servers stared at the chimeras with unmasked trepidation. For their part, the chimeras perused the food offerings with identical unease.

  “Er…Master…” Number 3 said.

  “You got any meat that isn’t cooked yet?” Vykers asked the nearest server.

  The man nodded silently.

  “Well, that’s very nice and all…” Number 3 continued.

  “You got any meat that ain’t dead yet?” Vykers clarified.

  The servers exchanged looks of pure panic. The first server nodded again.

  “Like what, fer instance?”

  “Steer?” the man said, as if he were asking a question rather than answering one.

  Vykers noticed the Three were beaming. “That’ll do,” he said. “Can one o’ you fellas lead my boys to their dinner?”

  None of the servers volunteered, so Vykers volunteered one. “You!” he said to the first server. “Show ‘em the way and stay with ‘em, so nobody gets spooked. As you can imagine, their dining gets a little messier than most folks are used to. Wouldn’t want anyone in camp to get the wrong idea.”

  The server just about expired in fright, but he managed to lead the Three through the back of the tent.

  “Now,” Vykers said to the remaining servers, “whatta we got?”

  A short, chubby little man answered. “We have smoked ham, bacon, capon, beef, salted herring, uh, Merual sausage, duck eggs – boiled or, uh, fried – mutton, uh, four or five kinds of cheese – though I’d recommend the Brisial – brown bread, corn bread, just about every kind of jam you can think of…”

  It was clear the man meant to go on for some time.

  “I’ll take some of everything,” Vykers interjected.

  “Ev..uh..everything?” the man asked.

  “My accent too thick for ya? Everything!”

  He didn’t need to tell them a third time. The servers whirled into action, stacking several trays with samples of absolutely every last item they had available, until Vykers felt positively dizzy at the sight.

  “Why don’t you just put everything over there?” he suggested, pointing to a table in the corner. “And what’ve you got to drink?”

  The chubby server started, “Uh, we’ve got…oh, never mind. We’ll bring some of everything, and it please you.”

  It did. The first tray had barely touched down and Vykers had stuffed his mouth to capacity with…something…delicious. He groaned in inarticulate praise and offered his servers a hearty thumbs-up. Halfway through his third tray, the Reaper saw a large shadow fill the doorway, and he looked up from his meal to see three men – generals or some such, he guessed – he’d never seen before. From the looks on their faces, he could see they were no threat to him. He wiped his mouth with his forearm.

  “One o’ you in charge, here?”

  The most ostentatiously dressed of them stepped forward. “Actually, you are, Mr. Vykers. As per the Queen’s orders.”

  Still chewing, Vykers waved the men forward, offered them seats.

  “Thank you, sir, but we’ve eaten,” the ostentatious man said.

  “Huh. You mind if I finish up here?”

  “Not at all,” the man replied, in a manner that suggested he felt rather pressed for time. “I’m Lord Marshall Ferzic. This gentleman…” he said, indicating the man on his right, “is General Branch, and this gentleman,” he said, referring to the other, “is Major Bailis.”

  “Uh-huh,” the Reaper said. “And you already know who I am.”

  “And your three…friends?” the Lord Marshall asked delicately.

  “Gifts from Her Majesty.”

  “Ah…yes. Do you have any particular orders for us this morning?” the Lord Marshall asked. “The enemy shows every sign of preparation for a major assault.”

  Vykers stretched, belched. “Yeah. I wanna talk to the troops. All of ‘em.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m gonna need a wagon or something to stand on.”

  “That shouldn’t prove difficult to arrange.”

  Vykers reached over to his pack and nudged it towards the Lord Marshall. “Have somebody keep this safe, will you?”

  “Yes,” Ferzic replied tersely.

  “Good. Give me, say, half an hour and I’ll be ready.”

  The three officers traded looks of confusion.

  “Gotta finish eating and visit the jakes,” Vykers explained. “Never know when your next chance is your last.”

  *****

  Janks & Company, In Battle

  Everyone knew the final push was coming. The End kept thousands of thralls at the front just to keep the pressure on the Queen’s men, but the bulk of his host was gathering into an enormous, dense, dark block in the meadow’s center. Against the
light dusting of snow that now covered the ground, the enemy’s host looked somehow smaller – not the massive, unending sea of thralls and mercs that had threatened the Queen’s army just a day ago, but something at once more familiar and pathetic. Still, there were enough warm bodies on the End’s side to smother and rout the Queen’s army. Nobody was thinking too far ahead.

  Another unit had stepped in to spell Kittins’ men for a while. These new troops were saviors and saints to a man, and Janks would’ve said so if talking hadn’t required too much energy. Instead, he joined his fellows some fifty yards back of the fray and collapsed in a heap on a bale of hay meant, he supposed, for the cavalry’s mounts. Conventional wisdom had it that sitting or lying down between stints at the front only made you more stiff, more sore. Janks didn’t give a shit. Another five seconds and he’d’ve passed out from exhaustion and dehydration – there’s only so much an A’Shea can do during battle, after all, to keep the men fresh; the real work came later – mending the wounded, releasing the dying. The corporal didn’t need either of those, though he knew he’d acquired some new scars in this fight. One o’ them thralls, for instance, had taken a sizeable bite out of his left ear. His mates’d be impressed, but his potential mates would be distressed. In war, men respect ugly scars, but women rarely found them sexy. Or maybe they were objecting to his body odor. Mahnus’ balls, how he stank! A normal enemy might’ve been repelled by his stink. Not the thralls. It seemed to bring ‘em on, the way fish oil attracts cats.

  Someone dangled a water skin in Janks’ face and he drank deeply without pause or question. Much as he’d been a borderline drunkard, he’d swear, again, there never was or would be any drink better than pure, cold water. It almost made him believe in Alheria. Janks heard waves of cheering break out throughout the camp, and he twisted his weary torso this way and that to see what the excitement was all about.

  “They’re sayin’ the Reaper’s arrived,” Kittins said in a voice raspy from too many war cries. With half his face torn away, he looked about as bad as Janks felt. Good to know the bastard was struggling, too.

  “The Reaper?” That was Spirk, of course. Except for the gash in his chin, he looked surprisingly healthy.

  Janks pulled himself up. Damn, but that was hard. He fought his way onto the hay bale. Sure enough, there was a crowd gathering a couple hundred yards uphill and, in their midst, a man stood atop a supply wagon. Suddenly, the old corporal felt a surge of nervous energy. “Let’s get closer,” he breathed. “I wanna see if it’s true, hear what he has to say.”

  He got no argument from his comrades. Each and every one of them stumbled after him. From a distance, they looked like nothing more than besotted invalids, holding some sort of perverse relay race-of-the-damned. But they got where they were going.

  It took several minutes for the cheering to die down, during which time Janks got his first good look at the legendary Tarmun Vykers. He was not disappointed. Though not as tall or as muscle-bound as rumor made him out to be, Vykers was still a head taller than Janks and appeared as solid as an anvil. He wore his hair and beard short in the style of the midland kingdoms, but couldn’t have been more foreign to them if he’d been painted green. Janks wondered why it was he could not take his eyes off the man’s face. The Reaper was neither handsome nor charming, but possessed of an animal magnetism that was close to spellbinding, in much the same manner that staring into the face of a caged lion was spellbinding. When the cheering began to subside, Vykers spoke.

  “Morning, men,” he said so casually that almost everyone laughed at the greeting. “I’m sure over the years you’ve heard your share ‘o great speeches.” He paused. “This ain’t one o’ them.” Janks found himself liking the man more by the second. “Nope. All I’ve gotta say is, keep the End’s puppets at bay long enough for me to get close to the bastard. By the time I’m done with that fucker, even the maggots won’t want anything to do with him.”

  The Queen’s men burst into cheering and applause so loud the End’s generals must’ve quailed at the sound. That, Janks realized, was the power of legend. Scores of his fellows reached out to grasp hands with the Reaper, to touch his arm or shoulder. One of them touched the pommel of Vykers’ sword and fell, twitching, to the ground.

  “Curiosity,” Vykers said, “meet the cat.”

  One or two of the fallen man’s friends seemed offended, but everyone else shrugged it off. Vykers stepped aside with the Lord Marshall, a couple of generals and, Janks saw, Major Bailis. What he wouldn’t have given to be in Bailis’ boots for just five minutes. He’d love to know what the real plan was, how long the Reaper expected this battle to take, etc. Slowly, the crowd broke up and men went back to their assigned positions.

  “Got anything left for the enemy?” he heard Kittins ask him.

  Janks felt like the cock of the walk. “Plenty!” he boasted.

  *****

  They continued talking as they walked towards the back of the Queen’s camp, the furthest one could get from the front.

  “We thought perhaps we might send the cavalry out both sides and down the enemy’s flanks once the fighting got thick in the middle.”

  “Don’t see a problem, there,” Vykers told the Lord Marshall Ferzic. “I’m sure you’ve seen that, uh, buffer he’s giving the woods on both sides since his failed attempt to burn them down.”

  “Ah, yes,” Ferzic said, “the woods. The old Shaper…”

  “Pellas,” Vykers said.

  The other man seemed uncomfortable admitting it. “Eh, Pellas. Just so.”

  “And who am I?”

  “You?” Ferzic stammered. “Tarmun Vykers, the Reaper.”

  Vykers gripped the Lord Marshall’s shoulder. “Yes, the Reaper. And the old Shaper, as you call him, is Pellas. And that nasty fellow across the battlefield,” he pointed “is known as the End-of-All-Things.” Vykers looked the Lord Marshall in the eyes, forced him to maintain eye contact. “Rise to the occasion, sir, or the occasion will bury you.”

  Ferzic was not used to being spoken to in such a manner and looked as if he wanted to argue Vykers’ point. Glancing at his generals and Major Bailis, however, he concluded that might prove unwise and shut his mouth.

  “So. Where were we?” Vykers wondered aloud. “You were gonna to tell me something about Pellas?”

  The Lord Marshall cleared his throat. “Yes. It’s rather hard to credit, but he says the woods are full of…fairies, I suppose you’d call them, for want of a better word. And, uh, these fairies, while not necessarily on our side, are almost certainly opposed to our enemy.”

  One of the generals chuckled softly to himself, but Vykers shot him a look and the man turned whiter than the snow at his feet. “Couple o’ months ago, I thought as you do,” he told the general. “But it turns out the world’s a good deal darker and more mysterious than I thought, and I’ll wager anything you like I’ve seen far more of it than you. You wanna laugh at the thought o’ fairies, go ahead. Just don’t come cryin’ to me if you manage to anger ‘em.” Vykers turned back to Ferzic. “We gotta fight, soon,” he said. “So, here it is: you’ll have that alley on both sides of the meadow, between the End’s armies and the woods. You wanna send your mounted troops out that way, that sounds like a good plan. I see you’ve got some siege weapons, trebuchets and such. Good. I’d use ‘em to pepper the middle o’ the End’s forces. Pellas says the Shapers you’ve got left’ll do the same. Make an obstacle of the enemy’s bodies. Your foot will have to keep scrapping in the middle, ‘til Pellas and I can work out our little surprise.”

  “And, em, if I might ask…” Ferzic began.

  “I don’t know when,” Vykers cut in. “It’ll happen when it happens.” Before he left the Queen’s command, he put in a last word, “Rise, men. Rise. You won’t like the alternative.”

  *****

  Long, In Battle

  There were not a lot of drums in the End’s host, but there was no shortage of horns, and when the final surge began, it w
as unquestionably clear to one and all. One moment, Long was sitting astride his horse, his eyes shifting in and out of focus, and the next, he was being pressed forward by thousands upon thousands of the End’s thralls. There was nowhere and no way to go but forward. As always, Long was struck by the sheer noise of his master’s host on the move. The entire world must have been at his back, minus the few unhappy souls they were about to trample into the snow.

  Funny thing about snow, though: it makes slopes slippery, especially when it’s been tamped down by countless feet, or iced over with frozen blood. Long’s horse handled the icy terrain ably enough, but thralls to his left and right lost footing and were crushed by those behind. So, the host would climb this hill on the backs of its own dead. Long quailed at the pointlessness of such deaths. He imagined the lives these thralls had lived when fully conscious and free, useful, productive lives, some full of bitterness, but some full of hope, surely. To think they’d end up as mere footing for others of their kind was beyond appalling.